My Top Business Regrets
No matter how established someone’s business is or how successful they appear to be on the surface, they always have top business regrets or mistakes that they feel they’ve made along their business journeys. So here, I wanted to pull back the curtain to open up about some of my past business regrets to show that you’re not alone if any of these resonate with you. The best part about making mistakes in business is being able to learn lessons from them, so I’ll also share the lesson I learned with each mistake to (hopefully) help you avoid the mistakes that I made!
Top Business Regret 1: Waiting too long to charge real money for my services
When I started my business while still working in a 9-5, I gave myself endless excuses for why I wasn’t “ready” to charge for my services yet. I spent WAY too much time working for free or at rates that were much too cheap for the services that I was offering.
I told myself I wasn't experienced enough or my work quality wasn't good enough. I told myself I didn't have enough life experience. I had ALL the excuses to justify my undercharging and I had a LOT of self-doubt! I would do like $25 or even $50 logos. I sometimes would even do $25 photography. And I did entire websites for free!
This was back when I was dabbling in both web design and photography, trying to figure out which one I would like enough to pursue as a serious business. I was operating pretty aimlessly at the time without a serious plan for the business, too.
So without having a real plan and with all of that self-doubt and those excuses running through my head about not being good enough at what I was doing yet to charge real money, I only made a little under $2,000 over like three years or so of “side hustling” on the side of my corporate job.
Looking back, I know that it definitely shouldn’t have taken me that long to make that amount of money. I was still delivering work at good quality, so I definitely should’ve been charging a lot more.
I know now that in reality, clients don’t necessarily care about how long you’ve been doing the service that you offer in your business, like we tend to think they do when we’re new. All clients really care about is your work quality and having a good client experience. As long as you’re going to deliver quality work with a smooth, easy experience for clients to work with you, you’re 100% worthy of charging for your services, even as a beginner.
Pro Tip: You don’t necessarily have to go straight to the top of the market to the highest rate you’d like to charge, but you can at least start around $1,000 and go up from there. Once I finally started charging real money for my web design services, I started at $1,500 and gradually increased my rates as a worked with more clients, until I got to $5,000.
So if you're in the early stages of your business now, don't be afraid to at least charge on the lower end and then work your way up. You don't have to work for free or for super dirt cheap just because you’re new. You need to believe in yourself and know that you're going to be committed to doing a great job for your clients. And as long as you're committed to doing that, it's okay.
Top Business Regret 2: Getting stuck in “complaining mode” instead of searching for a solution
The second top business regret that I have is not using my problem solving abilities to make more money in my business faster. Essentially, this was another reason why I made less money in my business when I still had a 9-5.
I really, really struggled to get people to book me at $500 back then. (Even though $500 is still underpriced, it was a big deal to me because I’d been doing work for free or almost free for so long.) But once I got enough courage to at least charge $500, the only clients who I could attract online were people who I either went to college with or who knew me from work. I only got one stranger to find me online and book me — a nonprofit owner from Chicago. She ended up being a great client.
But the only other clients who I could book at that time were people who knew me from college and they weren’t really serious about the design process and neither of them finished their projects or even paid me the full $500.
So I started complaining about people not being serious about investing in web design services and I generalized everyone, based on the handful of people I could attract to my business at that time. I told myself that people are annoying to work with. I told myself I wasn’t cut out for working with clients. And I went into straight up COMPLAINING mode.
But now that I look back, I see I should’ve gone into SOLUTION mode instead! I should’ve started figuring out how I could improve my marketing online to attract higher quality clients who were serious about investing in web design. And I should’ve reevaluated my client process to see how I could improve it to make me easier to work with to increase the likelihood of clients finishing their projects with me. But instead, I got stuck in complaining and ended up stuck in my business, and I became discouraged about working on my business for an entire year.
So I know from experience that if you get stuck in complaining mode when you don’t get the results you want, you’re going to waste months or even years being stuck, not making the progress you could be making in your business.
Instead, make going into solution mode normal for you, so whenever things happen in your business, sure you may get a little sad or disappointed for a moment, but don’t get stuck there, letting it derail you over a longer period of time! Know that there’s always a plan B or a plan C when plan A doesn’t work out!
Top Business Regret 3: Hiring the wrong business coach
At the end of 2019, I hired a business coach because she had a really appealing brand online. She seemed really fun and touted a TON of talk about teaching women how to become millionaires. I was so impressed because I thought it would be amazing to learn how to make a lot more money in my business from a women who was fun and who appeared to have so much wisdom to pass on to her clients. But I was so enamored by her brand online that I didn’t press beyond the surface level on the discovery call when hiring her. I just assumed her coaching program would have everything I’d need without getting the specific details on what we’d be learning.
So I signed up for her group business coaching hastily, making a five figure investment -- $15,000 to be exact — since I was on the payment plan option. But after the program started and a few months went by, I realized I was getting very little new business knowledge out of it and it was a super general overly-beginner business coaching program that didn’t fully apply to the business model I was focused on and it was mostly focused on mindset coaching. It started to feel more like a group life coaching program, instead of a business coaching program.
The mindset information was nice to have, but I still felt lost on what to do to grow my business. And when I asked for feedback on business issues I was having, I didn’t get any good help from the coaches on her team. And so as a result, I joined the program thinking it was going to teach me how to grow the course side of my business in 2020, but that program didn’t give me any real clarity on how to grow that side of the business and I was plateaued all year.
Later in 2020, I found another coach who specialized in helping business owners grow online course businesses and I ended up hiring her and received so much clarity on what was missing that was causing my course sales to plateau. When hiring her, I was able to see like her full curriculum of what she’d be teaching in detail first and the type of support that would be offered, making sure it included all the info I needed, specifically for a course business. And I’ve now been busy at work implementing all those strategies. It was also a five-figure investment, but since it’s actually useful knowledge, it’s an investment that’s been worth it this time around!
So the lesson here is to make sure you see the details of exactly what a coach will be teaching you in their curriculum before you sign up for their coaching program — especially if it’s a high end five-figure investment! Don’t just assume that because a coach appears to be an expert that they’ll teach you everything you need to know without you knowing the details before you sign on the dotted line.
And also choose a coach who specializes in teaching strategies specifically for the business model that you’re trying to grow. Not all businesses thrive with the same strategies. The strategies to grow a service-based business different from the strategies to grow a course business. And the strategies to grow a course business are different from the strategies to grow an e-commerce business. So be wary of people who are “general” business coaches, who claim that they can teach you growth strategies for any business. If they promise this, that’s a red flag that they probably don’t know what they’re doing!
Or if there’s a specific skill you want to learn, hire a business coach who specializes in that skill – like if you want to learn copywriting, hire a copywriting coach, or if you want to learn Facebook ads, hire a Facebook ads coach, etc. When someone is specializing in a specific skill/area of expertise, they usually know their stuff, so you’ll get a lot of value out of it, like you would with a coach that specializes in your business type.
Business coaching can be a really valuable investment for your business and it can drastically cut down on your learning curve in business, but you just have to do your due diligence to make sure you hire the right coach for your needs!
In conclusion — My top business regrets were: waiting too long to charge “real money” for my services, getting stuck in “complaining mode” when I didn’t get the results I wanted in business, instead of going into “solution mode” to figure out how to get better results, and hiring the wrong business coach. These are all issues that you can easily avoid if you – charge at least $1,000 for your services from the start and go up from there as you gain experience, focus on finding solutions whenever problems arise in your business, and choose a business coach who’s curriculum you can review before you sign up to work with him/her and choose a coach who’s teaching strategies tailored for your specific business type or strategies for a specific skill that you want to learn.
